Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island

“Dolores, I’m serious—you don’t talk like that in this house.”

“So I’ve gotta assume you’re fucking her.”

“I’m not fucking anyone, and could you stop saying that word?”

“Which word?” She placed a hand over her dark public hair. “Fucking?”

“Yes.” He raised one hand. He went back to shaving with the other.

“So that’s a bad word?”

“You know it is.” He pulled the razor up his throat, heard the scratch of hairs through the foam.

“So what’s a good word?”

“Huh?” He dipped the razor, shook it.

“What word about my body won’t cause you to make a fist?”

“I didn’t make a fist.”

“You did.”

He finished his throat, wiped the razor on a facecloth. He laid the flat of it below his left sideburn. “No, honey. I didn’t.” He caught her left eye in the mirror.

“What should I say?” She ran one hand through her upper hair and one through her lower. “I mean, you can lick it and you can kiss it and you can fuck it. You can watch a baby come out of it. But you can’t say it?”

“Dolores.”

“Cunt,” she said.

The razor slid so far through Teddy’s skin he suspected it hit jaw bone. It widened his eyes and lit up the entire left side of his face, and then some shaving cream dripped into the wound and eels exploded through his head and the blood poured into the white clouds and water in the sink.

She came to him with a towel, but he pushed her away and sucked air through his teeth and felt the pain burrowing into his eyes, scorching his brain, and he bled into the sink and he felt like crying. Not from the pain. Not from the hangover. But because he didn’t know what was happening to his wife, to the girl he’d first danced with at the Cocoanut Grove. He didn’t know what she was becoming or what the world was becoming with its lesions of tiny, dirty wars and furious hatreds and spies in Washington, in Hollywood, gas masks in schoolhouses, cement bomb shelters in basements. And it was, somehow, all connected—his wife, this world, his drinking, the war he’d fought because he honestly believed it would end all this…

He bled into the sink and Dolores said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and he took the towel the second time she offered it but couldn’t touch her, couldn’t look at her. He could hear the tears in her voice and he knew there were tears in her eyes and on her face, and he hated how fucked up and obscene the world and everything in it had become.

IN THE PAPER, he’d been quoted as saying the last thing he told his wife was that he loved her.

A lie.

The last thing he really said?

Reaching for the doorknob, a third towel pressed to his jaw, her eyes searching his face:

“Jesus, Dolores, you’ve got to get yourself together. You’ve got responsibilities. Think about those sometimes—okay?—and get your fucking head right.”

Those were the last words his wife heard from him. He’d closed the door and walked down the stairs, paused on the last step. He thought of going back. He thought of going back up the stairs and into the apartment and somehow making it right. Or, if not right, at least softer.

Softer. That would have been nice.

THE WOMAN WITH the licorice scar across her throat came waddling down the breezeway toward them, her ankles and wrists enchained, an orderly on each elbow. She looked happy and made duck sounds and tried to flap her elbows.

“What did she do?” Chuck said.

“This one?” the orderly said. “This here Old Maggie. Maggie Moonpie, we call her. She just going to Hydro. Can’t take no chances with her, though.”

Maggie stopped in front of them, and the orderlies made a halfhearted attempt to keep her moving, but she shoved back with her elbows and dug her heels against the stone, and one of the orderlies rolled his eyes and sighed.

“She gone proselytize now, hear?”

Maggie stared up into their faces, her head cocked to the right and moving like a turtle sniffing its way out of its shell.

“I am the way,” she said. “I am the light. And I will not bake your fucking pies. I will not. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” Chuck said.

“You bet,” Teddy said. “No pies.”

“You’ve been here. You’ll stay here.” Maggie sniffed the air. “It’s your future and your past and it cycles like the moon cycles around the earth.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She leaned in close and sniffed them. First Teddy, then Chuck.

“They keep secrets. That’s what feeds this hell.”

“Well, that and pies,” Chuck said.

She smiled at him, and for a moment it seemed as if someone lucid entered her body and passed behind her pupils.

“Laugh,” she said to Chuck. “It’s good for the soul. Laugh.”

“Okay,” Chuck said. “I will, ma’am.”

She touched his nose with a hooked finger. “I want to remember you that way—laughing.”

And then she turned away and started walking. The orderlies fell into step and they walked down the breezeway and through a side door into the hospital.

Chuck said, “Fun girl.”

“Kind you’d bring home to Mom.”

“And then she’d kill Mom and bury her in an out-house, but still…” Chuck lit a cigarette. “Laeddis.”

“Killed my wife.”

“You said that. How?”

“He was a firebug.”

“Said that too.”

“He was also the maintenance man in our building. Got in a fight with the owner. The owner fired him. At the time, all we knew was that the fire was arson. Someone had set it. Laeddis was on a list of suspects, but it took them a while to find him, and once they did, he’d shored up an alibi. Hell, I wasn’t even sure it was him.”

“What changed your mind?”

“A year ago, I open the paper and there he is. Burned down a schoolhouse where he’d been working. Same story—they fired him and he came back, lit it in the basement, primed the boiler so it would explode. Exact same M.O. Identical. No kids in the schoolhouse, but the principal was there, working late. She died. Laeddis went to trial, claimed he heard voices, what have you, and they committed him to Shattuck. Something happened there—I don’t know what—but he was transferred here six months ago.”

“But no one’s seen him.”

“No one in Ward A or B.”

“Which suggests he’s in C.”

“Yup.”

“Or dead.”

“Possibly. One more reason to find the cemetery.”

“Let’s say he isn’t dead, though.”

“Okay…”

“If you find him, Teddy, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t bullshit me, boss.”

A pair of nurses came toward them, heels clicking, bodies pressed close to the wall to avoid the rain.

“You guys are wet ,” one of them said.

“ All wet?” Chuck said, and the one closest to the wall, a tiny girl with short black hair, laughed.

Once they’d passed, the black-haired nurse looked back over her shoulder at them. “You marshals always so flirty?”

“Depends,” Chuck said.

“On?”

“Quality of personnel.”

That stopped both of them for a moment, and then they got it, and the black-haired nurse buried her face in the other one’s shoulder, and they burst out laughing and walked to the hospital door.

Christ, how Teddy envied Chuck. His ability to believe in the words he spoke. In silly flirtations. In his easy-GI’s penchant for quick, meaningless wordplay. But most of all for the weightlessness of his charm.

Charm had never come easily to Teddy. After the war, it had come harder still. After Dolores, not at all.

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.